About TheLayoffRadar

We track workforce stress at S&P 500 companies and surface it early. We read what employees say publicly, score it, and turn it into a rating you can check in seconds — often months before a layoff reaches a press release.

How the rating works

Canary Ratings score each company's workforce stress from 0 to 100 and map it to a familiar AAA to CC scale. Lower is healthier: AAA means minimal stress, CC means severe. Alongside the grade, each company carries an outlook — improving, stable, or deteriorating.

Ratings are monthly point-in-time snapshots. We don't rewrite history: what we published last month stays as we published it, so our track record can be checked rather than taken on trust.

What feeds the score

A language model reads public workplace discussion and classifies each post across the signals below. Each one carries its own weight in the composite score.

Layoff intent
The strongest single predictor in the model
Overall negativity
Baseline mood across everything employees post
Departure intent
People signalling they plan to leave
Leadership instability
Churn and uncertainty at the top
Compensation change
An early indicator of margin pressure
Unionization activity
Low frequency, high impact when it appears
Return-to-office friction
Reliably precedes attrition waves
Quality issues & product delays
Secondary stress on the organisation
Hiring signals
Push the score down — growth is a sign of health, and the model credits it.

Events that override the score

Some signals are too important to average away. A CFO departure, or a layoff signal above 40%, forces an immediate downgrade no matter what the composite score says.

Does it actually work?

We publish our hit rate, lead time and precision, measured against confirmed mass layoffs from WARN filings and SEC 8-K disclosures. The figures are computed live from that data rather than hand-set — including the ones that aren't flattering.

See the numbers →

Data sources

  • Public workplace discussion forums — the primary signal, and the reason we see stress before it's announced.
  • WARN notices — legally required layoff filings. Our ground truth for confirmed events.
  • SEC EDGAR 8-K filings — executive departures and restructuring, disclosed by the companies themselves.
  • News coverage — used to confirm events after the fact, not to predict them. By the time a layoff is news, it isn't early.

On your phone

TheLayoffRadar is available on iOS and Android — ratings, alerts when a company you follow is downgraded, and the community feed, wherever you are.

Who we are

TheLayoffRadar is built and operated by Grand Nasser Enterprises Inc. For support, press, or business enquiries:

Disclaimer

Canary Ratings are probabilistic estimates for informational purposes only. They are not predictions of certainty, and a low-stress rating is not a guarantee that a company is safe. They should not be used as the sole basis for investment or employment decisions. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Our signals are derived from public sources and depend on how much public discussion, filing and news coverage exists for a given company. Coverage is uneven by design of the underlying data, not by preference.

Employee commentary reflects the views of the people who wrote it, not ours. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any forum, employer, or company named on this site.